Abstract

In the scientific community it is generally accepted that metaanalyses are more accurate than single studies and independent studies more trustworthy than industrial studies. It is therefore understandable that Cochrane reviews, meta-analyses based on rigid protocol and independent origin, have the highest quality in medical research. It is therefore unfortunate that Cochrane reviews seems systematically to conflict with the information and recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO). A number of the drugs and vaccines recommended by WHO, especially the drugs used in psychiatry, are in Cochrane reviews found to be harmful and without significant clinical effect. Since whose recommendations are followed by many people in the member states, it could indeed lead to patients getting the wrong medication and many patients have severe adverse effects, because of these drugs. To solve this serious public health problem it is recommended to revise the WHO-system, which in fact has been proven weak to the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. We therefore believe that the WHO’s recommendations regarding medicine in its “list of essential medicines” and other drug directories are biased and not reliable as a source of information on medicine

Introduction

“So the potential significance of the call was clear to Fukuda: the start of a devastating pandemic, in which, according to WHO estimates, between 2.0 and 7.4 million could die -- assuming the pandemic was relatively mild. But if the new virus proved to be as aggressive as the one that triggered the Spanish Flu in 1918, the death toll could run to the tens of millions” [1,2].

April 29, 2009: The WHO raises its warning to phase 5, the last stage before a pandemic.

April 30, 2009: Egypt begins killing all domestic pigs in the country. French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot begs President Hosni Mubarak to stop the mass slaughter, but her appeals are unsuccessful.

May 4, 2009: In Mexico, football matches in the country’s four highest-ranking leagues take place without spectators. The legislature in Germany’s western state of Saarland imposes a ban on kissing as a form of greeting. Der Spiegel [1,2].

Oct. 9, 2009: Wolf-Dieter Ludwig, an oncologist and chairman of the Drug Commission of the German Medical Association, says: “The health authorities have fallen for a campaign by the pharmaceutical companies, which were plainly using a supposed threat to make money” [1,2].

The World Health Organization (WHO) is guiding the public health services of 194 member states and a number of other countries regarding their use of pharmacological drugs, vaccines, and non-drug medicine (psychotherapy, physical therapy, alternative medicine(CAM) etc.). Ten years ago WHO changed its financial policy and allowed private money into its system, instead of only funding from the member states [3,4]. WHO has since been extremely successful in raising funds and is now receiving more than half of its yearly budget from private sources [3,4]. Bill Gates has for example given more than one billion dollars to the WHO [4]. The new system of private funding of WHO has brought WHO much closer to the pharmaceutical industry.

This change in policy honoring rationality and science to serving the pharmaceutical industry and going for its money is what this article is about. I hope you are sitting down, because you might be up for a big surprise.

WHO director-general Margaret Chan has been rated as the 30th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes Magazine [5] and this fact might give you an idea of the power I want to talk about.

More than half the population on planet Earth is more or less nfluenced by the advice and recommendations given by WHO. We estimate that 350 million patients – the sick population of the major cities of the wealthy member states - are receiving medical treatment with drugs partly or dominantly based on recommendations from the WHO.

We believe that WHO is biased regarding pharmaceutical drugs. This is evident to us, when we compare the recommendations in the WHO’s drug directories – i.e. “WHO’s model list of essential medicines [6] with the recommendations from independent researchers analyzing the positive and negative effects of drugs and vaccines, like for example Cochrane reviews.

Cochrane reviews are an acknowledged source of knowledge in medicine, because these meta-analyses come from the Cochrane organization’s 3,000 independent physicians and researchers who in their unselfish service for humanity are documenting the effect of almost all the pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines and also of hundreds or more of different types of non-drug medicine, including a variety of alternative treatments (CAM) [7].

The results from the Cochrane reviews, which most researchers regard as a much more reliable source of information on medicine than the data coming from the pharmaceutical industry itself, clash harshly with the recommendations of WHO in its drug directories. The Cochrane meta-analyses have systematically found less effect and more harm from the pharmaceutical drugs than the pharmaceutical industry does, when it documents its own products, also when theindustry’s own data is used [8].

Many drugs listed in the WHO drug directories, like “WHOs model list of essential medicines” [6], have no value as medicine according to Cochrane reviews, since the drugs are dangerous, often harmful, and without significant beneficial effects for the patient. You can even say that the lack of effect and the danger of the drugs are well documented!

An example of drugs harmfull to patients include cytotoxic chemotherapy, which has a negative effect on the cancer patient quality of life and survival, as found by Ulrich Abel already in 1991 [9-11]]. Other examples are the lack of improvement of the mentally ill patients’ mental state with anti-psychotic or anti-depressant drugs found in recent Cochrane reviews [12,13], the newly documented lack of effect of the influenza vaccines [14], and of the anti-influenza medicines [15].

Leaders of the Cochrane movement have openly criticized the pharmaceutical industry for buying and manipulating the researchers and cheating with the design and results of the randomized controlled trial (RCT)-test that documents the effects of their drugs [8]. The Danish director of the Nordic Cochrane Center openly addressed what he called “the criminal practices of the pharmaceutical industry” [8] and documented in his book the problem that “Big Pharma” already has taken patient’s lives and caused harm to patients from the use of poisonous, poorly documented, and ineffective medicine [8].

The 2009 Pandemic (Swine Flu)

In 1988 Halfdan Mahler (WHO director general during 1973- 1988) in the daily Danish newspaper Politiken warned the world against the power the pharmaceutical industry had over WHO: “the industry is taking over WHO”, he said. But nobody believed him, because it was too difficult for the public to understand the complicated power games he talked about. Unfortunately he was right.

Recent scandals, like the Swine Flu scandal in 2009, has shown that WHO unfortunately has succumbed totally to the power of the pharmaceutical industry [1,2,17-59]; we have also gained important insight in how the WHO-system works. Let us take a look at some of the facts that came to public knowledge during this scandal.

On June 11, 2009 the WHO declared that the world faced a horrible and deathly influenza pandemic [17,19,23,27-29,38,41,42,58] with millions of people predicted to die in the worst disaster in modern time. All over the world more than two hundred countries prepared for the pandemic like the plague or the Spanish Flu, which over the next few months could claim the lives of 40 million people or so - as it happened during the Spanish Flu in the cold and bitter years 1918-1919 following World War I.

In June and July 2009 national borders were suddenly closed, thousands of public meeting places, like restaurants, cafes, and libraries in many countries were closed, and millions of travelers were stopped from entering a number of countries in Asia, if they had fever or a common cold [27-29,38,41,42,58].

Many people travelling wasted hours on emergency health controls and physicians, hospitals and Ministries of Health panicked and started to send patients home. Many countries started to buy influenza vaccines or anti-influenza drugs and spend vast amounts of dollars [1,2,17-59]. The pharmaceutical industry had good days indeed.

As the world reacted to the threat by continuing to buy incredible amounts of influenza vaccines and anti-influenza medicine a debate started in the scientific media like the British Medical Journal (BMJ) [15-25] and slowly also in the public media worldwide [1,2,24-59]. Suddenly WHO was accused of “crying wolf” [23] and supporting the pharmaceutical industry [1,2,14-25].

It turned out to be a false alarm and the Swine Flu epidemic in 2009 did not cause the many cases of deaths as first expected [12,13,15-25]. Slowly it became known that the WHO actually knew this already BEFORE the director-general Margaret Chan declared the pandemic. This can be seen by the fact that WHO changed the definition of a “pandemic” from meaning “millions of deaths” to mean a nondangerous infection that spreads worldwide only one month before the WHO’s declaration of the pandemic [1,2,14-25,28,29].

In 2010 a number of representatives from governments all over the world as well as a number of international organizations i.e. the Council of Europe agreed that WHO had caused an international panic and disaster by declaring the mildest flu ever, the A/H1N1 “Swine flu” influenza, to be a pandemic threatening mankind. The Council of Europe pointed in a dire report to the problem of WHO going private as the true cause of all the trouble [58].

During 2010 the situation continued to develop and turned into a medical scandal of unknown proportions [1,2,17-59]. Ineffective and dangerous medicines worth billions of dollars were sent for destruction. Close and secret links between the WHO and the pharmaceutical industry producing the vaccines was exposed. The Danish newspaper “Information” found that five researchers involving in advising WHO during the scandal had been paid around seven million EURO from the vaccine industry [38].

The vaccines and the anti-influenza medicine were in Cochrane reviews documented to be totally without value and burdening its users with a long list of adverse effects [1,2,14-25,28,29,59].

Soon it was realized that thousands of patients suffered from a wide range of serious adverse effects: local inflammations, local or systemic muscle pain, vasculitis, neuritis (autoimmune nerve-inflammations), encephalitis, narcolepsy, and other chronic pains [19.28,29,43,49,51,58]. The media then discovered that the adjuvants used in vaccines had many serious adverse effects that were mentioned to the citizens neither by the companies who sold the vaccines, nor by the governments buying and reselling the vaccines [1,2,17-59].

It also turned out that the contracts the industry had made with the countries included a paragraph that the adverse effects were the buyer’s full responsibility [1,2,17-25,28,29,30-59].

In an interview the Polish health minister revealed everything about the horrible industrial contracts, where the pharmaceutical companies - helped by WHO - sold vaccines that were not even properly tested! The minister pointed to the fact that the test groups were extraordinary small – so small that the adverse effects of the vaccines could not even be evaluated [59].

In spite of these horrible terms almost every country in Europe still signed the contracts, bought the drugs and vaccines in enormous quantities: two flu-shots per citizen [1,2,17-25,28-59].

The media also brought WHO warning thoroughly and repeatedly and around July 2009 everybody knew about the coming catastrophe. One can easily understand the pressure on the many public health services and “better save than sorry” seems to have been the mantra everywhere. To understand the kind of pressure and stress the states and the ministries of health were put under, you need to realize that not to buy the vaccines could easily, because of the close links between the industry and the press, mean the fall of a whole government.

This was what motivated the governments to sign sleeping contracts with the industry, and WHO played a vital role in this; sleeping means that the contract only become realized if WHO would declare a pandemic – which happened later. This way WHO pushed enormous quantities of vaccines and anti-influenza drugs to its 194member states [1,2,17-59].

The scandal came with an after-match: During 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 many countries’ patient-organizations have started courtcases against the governments, who had given them the ineffective and dangerous medicine [28,29,44,59].

It also became clear that it was the flu-vaccine-industry that had taken control over WHO and created a fake pandemic and the world wanted an answer to this question: Did WHO fail its responsibility as leader in international health in 2009? [1,2,14-23,28,29,58].

WHO agreed after a long period of total denial to make an investigation of itself; but after one year the internal WHO-report from the committee concluded that WHO had done nothing wrong at all. After the hearing of about 500 experts the WHO’s investigation group concluded that WHO had done absolutely nothing wrong in 2009: “WHO performed well in many ways during the pandemic” [60].

Everybody who followed the development of the scandal and the exposure in the media - The Guardian, Der Spiegel, the BMJ and a number of other serious media - had to conclude that the biggest medical scandal ever was only possible, because something is wrong in the WHO-system [1,2,17-25,28-59].

Facts about Influenza

When the influenza comes it spreads all over via small drops with the virus in each, but out of all people infected only between 5-15% of the population develops the flu; 16% of these cases are influenza type A, B or C – and only 10% are of type A and B, which we can vaccinate against [14].

This means that 1% of all gets the A or B influenza. If these people are vaccinated with the right type of flu, they can benefit from the vaccine. How many patients are helped of this 1% of the general population? Unfortunately only a small fraction, as the vaccine for influenza virus according to the big Cochrane meta-analysis is highly ineffective [14]. So maybe one in a thousand can be helped to avoid a week in the bed, or get this year’s flu shortened.

Unfortunately vaccinations are not free of adverse effects, as the adjuvant needed to provoke an immune response to a “dead” virion is provoking not only a response to the virus, but also to the body’s own cells and molecules. Which gives a perfectly rational explanation for the many side effects we see from vaccination, both local and system, with local inflammation, local or systemic muscle pain, vasculitis, neuritis, encephalitis or narcolepsy as the severe adverse effects. The local adverse effects comes with every second vaccine or so, while the dire systemic effects are seen in one patient out of 1,000. If you vaccinate 1,000,000 people you will safe 1,000 from influenza, but you give 1,000 side effects, sometimes worse than the influenza itself. Such a negative balance between positive and negative effects will in a rational regime lead to the conclusion that the vaccine is not a rational medicine. It has no general use [14].

If the influenza is very mild – as the Swine Flu A/H1N1 we had in the 2009 pandemic – there is no reason to fear it at all and even less reason to try to vaccine for it. Actually the pandemic H1A1 flu was the mildest flu we ever had – pandemic or epidemic and it was even predictable from the statistics on the H1A1 flu that pandemics are getting milder and milder; all experts who were independent of the vaccine industry predicted that this pandemic would to be the mildest influenza pandemic ever [1,2,17-59].

So now compare this to the fact that WHO warned the world that many million people would die from it. Remember that WHO declared that we faced a deathly, horrible influenza pandemic, comparable to the Spanish flu in 1918-19, which killed about 40 million people.

And consider the impact of this. In many countries the panic was total. In Egypt the government ordered all pigs slaughtered [56]; in Mexico the government closes all restaurants and public places [56]. In Asia the borders into China, Japan, Nepal and a number of other countries were closed for everybody with a fewer. A hundred million travelers had their travel prolonged with security checks for hours. Thousands of passengers with common colds were sent back home.

How Was the Vaccines Sold?

The WHO declaration of pandemic had an interesting consequence for a large number of pharmaceutical companies selling the vaccine and other types of flu medicine.

The deeper the investigative journalist and people from independent organizations like the European Parliament digged, the uglier became the truth that was revealed. In the end an intimate cooperation between the pharmaceutical industry and WHO was exposed; a large number of people from the industry had been placed in secret advisory groups in WHO close to the Chinese director Margaret Chan [1,2,17,18,26-32,34,36,38,38,41,43,44,-54-56,59]. These people got in this way direct access to the control over the total WHO system.

So the world learned that the pharmaceutical industry was running WHO! Wow So the industry itself declared the pandemic that forced all European countries and many more to buy enormous amount of ineffective and dangerous medicines [1,2,17-25,28,29,31-59]. But the scandal did not stop there. The contracts also contained paragraphs that transferred all responsibility for the adverse effects of the vaccine over to the governments of the countries [1,2,17-59]. When the Council of Europe learned about this it caused extreme anger; WHO was subsequently criticized [60]. In the end it turned out that the Cochrane experts and the Polish minister of health had been correct in their critique all the time, when they said that the pharmaceutical industry and WHO together were selling vaccines and medicines that were not properly tested and dangerous [64,64].

In spite of an international scandal directly caused by WHO that made hundreds of countries pay billions of dollars and EUROs from unnecessary vaccinations and medications, and in spite of thousands of victims for the serious adverse effects of these treatments, WHO concluded after the Swine Flu Scandal that all went well and happened according to the plans from 2005 [64] and that no errors had been made in the WHO system [5665].

Conclusion

Today after the Swine Flu Scandal it seems that the pharmaceutical industry has gained control over the WHO system, leading to an extreme bias towards the use of not only ineffective and unnecessary influenza vaccines and medicines, but also to the use of antipsychotics, antidepressant, antianxiety and other psychopharmacological drugs, cytotoxic anti-cancer chemotherapy, and a number of other drugs, which according to independent meta analyses and Cochrane reviews are found to be without significant beneficial effect – and often harmful.

﻿We recommend a fundamental revision of the WHO-system that has proven itself weak to the interests of the pharmaceutical industry